Sawbones

Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin welcome you to Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine. Every Friday, they dig through the annals of medical history to uncover all the odd, weird, wrong, dumb and just gross ways we've tried to fix people over the years. Educational? You bet! Fun? We hope!

Ladies, you know that menstruation is a natural, perhaps even beautiful part of life. But do you think that kept men from trying to put a stop to it? No. No, of course it didn't. This week on Sawbones, Dr. Sydnee and Justin are letting Aunt Flo crash on their couch with a brief history of menstruation.

There's no way of overstating the importance of this episode, so we're just gonna lay it out there: Royal Rife invented a cancer-curing death ray and it's being kept from you by ... somebody. Sort of. Maybe. Don't worry, Dr. Sydnee and Justin are blowing this one wide open.

Holiday celebrating get a little out of control? Having troubling shaking that fuzzy feeling? Do you just have too many extra pickled sheep eyeballs lying around? This week on Sawbones, Dr. Sydnee and Justin will walk you through the stomach-turning history of hangover cures.

Planning on over-indulging this week as the holidays swallow you up like a sinkhole? Don't worry about it! Dry out after the new year as Dr. Sydnee and Justin walk you through all the horrible ways we've attempted to cure alcoholism.

One afternoon, Albert Einstein spent an afternoon studying a box that was supposed to harness cosmic sex energy. This happened. Really. And this week on Sawbones, Dr. Sydnee and Justin will introduce you to Wilhelm Reich, the man who made that incredible moment possible.

Headaches: Widely regarded as the lowest pain way to get the sympathy due to the infirmed, they're also one of mankind's biggest targets for bad medicine and misguided folk cures. This week on Sawbones, join Dr. Sydnee and Justin as they attempt to get your head right.

The answer, of course, is basically everybody. But that didn't stop the subjects of this week's episode from taking matters into their own hands and going under a knife that they themselves were holding. Join Dr. Sydnee and Justin as the meet the heroes and dullards of self-surgery.

Ready to be a YouTube sensation? Not so fast, buckaroo. You're gonna need a baby first, so you can teach it to do something adorable that you can capture in a candid moment. First step: You've got to get fertile, and Dr. Sydnee and Justin have a perfect cocktail of largely baseless historical treatments to help you get there.

Listen, it's a great hairpiece, nobody's arguing that. But we know. We all know. Luckily, Dr. Sydnee and Justin are here to help you cast it off as we bring you time-tested, largely fake cures for baldness in an episode suggested by our buddy Brentalfloss. Enjoy!

Last week, Dr. Sydnee and Justin explored all the ways you, the listener, could live forever. None of those panned out for you? Never fear! This week, we're bringing the dead back to life with a brief history of reanimation.